Consistent with the aforementioned report of IUGR induced by protein restriction, our study revealed that the rats with IUGR had significantly higher cleaved caspase-3 (p < 0.05) and Bax/Bcl-2 levels (p < 0.001) than the control rats (see Additional file 1: Fig. S1 & Fig. 1). Here, BAX is linked to fetal growth restriction.